Crash Course Electronic Computing

The electrically-controlled mechanical switches used in room-sized computers were called ___

• mechanical relays
• transistors
• vacuum tubes
• dipole switches

You can think of a relay like a water faucet. The control wire is like the ___

• spout
• flow of water
• faucet handle
• supply pipe

A good relay in the 1940’s might be able to flick back and forth ___

• five times in a second
• fifty times in a second
• 500 times in a second
• 500 times in an hour

For the Harvard Mark I, complex operations, like a trigonometric function, could take ___

• a few seconds
• six seconds
• 15 seconds
• over a minute

The Harvard Mark I had roughly 3500 relays. On average, one faulty relay would need replacing every ___

• hour
• day
• week
• month

What type of "bug" was pulled from the Harvard Mark II in September 1947?

• a grasshopper
• a butterfly
• a housefly
• a moth

She said, "From then on, when anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it."

• Ava Lovelace
• Grace Hopper
• Clair Babbage
• Edith Clarke

In 1904, English physicist John Ambrose Fleming developed the first ___

• mechanical relay
• vacuum tube
• transistor
• integrated circuit

An electronic component that permits the one-way flow of current is called ___

• a transistor
• a diode
• a relay
• a switch

In 1906, what did Lee de Forest add to the Fleming valve?

• a glass envelope
• a third “control” electrode
• a mechanical relay
• a dipole switch